REMEMBER WHEN? The Funniest Old Microsoft Ads

There's nothing like a trip through a photo album to see how much things change. The world's most powerful software company wasn't always that way.

Microsoft was born in 1975, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Less than a decade later, hundreds of IBM clones had arrived that used Microsoft's DOS, and Microsoft was on its way.

And there were applications, too. In the pages that follow, you'll see the ancestor to the modern-day spreadsheet and the product that launched a years-long lawsuit that didn't end until late last year (in a mistrial).

You'll see the first version of Windows, too. You could buy about a dozen iPhones for what you would have paid for a state-of-the-art Windows 1.0 PC.